CASE STUDY
THE PHYSICAL
NATURE OF THE
DOCUMENTS
THEMSELVES
MAKES SCANNING
A CHALLENGE
SINCE THEY ARE
OF ODD SIZES;
SOME ARE NEARLY
60 YEARS OLD
AND ARE IN BAD
CONDITION.
The file compression technology of Kodak
Alaris scanners has reduced storage and
internet bandwidth requirements. SEWA,
with the support of Kodak Alaris, aims to
digitise 100% of their documents (over 18
million pages) within three to four years.
Dr Rashid Alleem, Chairman of SEWA, said:
“We believe that aligning business and
technology is critical to mitigating business
risks and maximising benefits from the
technologies. The value proposition of digital
transformation is immense.
“A strong digital workplace is vital to
achieving an organisation’s goals in the
digital economy. SEWA touches the lives
of over 1.5 million people in Sharjah, so
it’s important to have smart technology
to facilitate providing the best services.
Our customers and employees are reaping
benefits. Our ethos in the organisation is
collaboration and co-creation and hence
we have secured the best technology
companies to work with. Among them,
we have selected Kodak Alaris for all our
scanning requirements.
“In our earlier IT environment, we had a
mix of various brands of scanners and we
found Kodak Alaris to be far superior in terms
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of image quality, reliability, compression
capability and speed. So we decided to
standardise on Kodak Alaris for all our
scanners across the organisation.”
When the decision was taken to embark on
a digital transformation journey, one of the
top priorities for the IT department was to
digitise all the documents from the various
SEWA offices.
It was decided to follow a step-by-step
process for digital transformation starting with
digitisation of paper documents and then
moving things on-line and trying to get as
close as possible to a paperless environment.
SEWA set up a centralised scanning
operation at Halwan in Sharjah and
deployed a mix of i4250 and i3200 scanners
from Kodak Alaris. Scanning takes place in
three shifts, 24x7, which means quality and
reliability are of the utmost importance.
“The scanners at our centralised scanning
location capture millions of documents
annually and work around the clock. As a
result, they need to be heavy duty, since
downtime affects productivity and is not an
option. The physical nature of the documents
themselves makes scanning a challenge since
they are of odd sizes; some are nearly 60
years old and are in bad condition,” said Dr
Rashid Alleem. “We have been very impressed
with Kodak Alaris’ scanning technology. It has
delivered nearly 100% scanning uptime with
no major breakdowns.”
Features in Kodak Alaris scanners like
Intelligent Document Protection ‘listen’ for
a tell-tale crumpling sound and immediately
stop the scanning process to protect paper
and the information it contains.
This has enabled the scanning of old,
brittle documents that would otherwise not
have been possible with other scanners.
With huge volumes of scanning, speed is
another important consideration and again,
Kodak Alaris scanners with speeds of up to
110 pages per minute (ppm) have been
instrumental in shortening the time required
for SEWA’s digitisation efforts.
One of the most important scanner features
has been Kodak Alaris’ file compression
technology, which the IT head of SEWA,
Sayed Tousifur Rahman, believes is the best
in the market because it saves files in less
than half the size of competitive offerings
and saves up to 50% of the storage costs.
He said: “If you capture an image at a higher
file size, storage costs are going to be high.
As a policy, we scan all documents in colour.
Kodak Alaris scans at 150 to 200 dpi and
compresses the image to a file size between
110kb and 150kb.
“When scanning volumes are as high as
ours, this makes a huge difference in storage
costs. It also affects network traffic. When
users download an image from the server, if
the image size is smaller, then download is
quicker and bandwidth usage is less. Kodak
Alaris has helped us optimise our server and
network resources.”
On average, SEWA has been scanning roughly
500,000 pages (approximately 100,000
documents having multiple pages) per month
using Kodak Alaris scanners. Archiving of
documents from the various SEWA offices is
at various levels of completion.
Citing an example of how Kodak Alaris
has helped SEWA streamline its records
management system and increase efficiency,
Dr Rashid Alleem, said: “In our Electricity
Services Department (ESD), customers used
to come to get permission for their new
construction site and we were supposed to
retrieve their old documents, which used
to take three to four days. Once we started
archiving the documents with the help of
Kodak Alaris scanners, it gave us the ability to
retrieve the information in seconds.”
SEWA currently has 30 Kodak Alaris scanners
in the centralised scanning centre and
across the various service centres. Kodak
Alaris-backed local service and support, a key
component of the Alaris IN2 Ecosystem, is
being delivered through Visiontech Systems
International LLC for planned maintenance as
well as fast break/fix response, when required.
“Kodak Alaris has been a strategic partner
for SEWA. As a head of IT, the best proof-
point from a technology standpoint is
not receiving any end-user complaints or
helpdesk requests. With Kodak Alaris, I have
absolute peace of mind. I look forward to
enlarging the scope of our relationship
with Kodak Alaris in the future,” said Sayed
Tousifur Rahman. n
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